The Generation of Disenchantment

Abstract

In Chile, my generation was called the generation of disenchantment. Those of us born between 1950 and 1955 found ourselves involved in the eternal ceremonies of fear and violence. We were the children of war. It was common among the students to see buses that burst into flames on the sidewalks or older women being dragged away by their beautiful long hair. The generation that came after ours, those born between 1960 and 1970, saw us as anomalous beings, meeting at the coffee shops for hours, talking about the depths of the earth and sky. They looked at us suspiciously. We, the disenchanted, learned not to trust them; they grew up under the legacy of violence and horror. They are called the invisible generation, but they are the ones responsible for the revision and reconstruction of a society dismembered, polarized, and rejected in its own history. They are the ones who continue to listen to the echo of the voices of the disappeared. We are the disappeared. In Chile, those of us who survived, the disenchanted and the invisible, still walk through our neighborhoods, through the familiar stores looking for certain smells and familiar corners. It is very reassuring for us to know that on certain streets, amidst the smog, we can still smell the gardenias, and that the grandparents of our friends still live, that it is possible to take a left turn, continue toward the mountains, and see them sitting in front of the old TV set as if nothing had happened. But what has happened to us? For the generation of disenchantment, our social struggle coincided with the most repressive years in the political history of various South American countries. We contributed to the language of horror with the word disappeared, and we mask this word ever so often in our everyday conversations when, confused, we asked about the lost, those without a voice, those who we know have been tortured and buried in some common grave. And our questioning began just recently, after twenty years of inheriting horror stories that clamored, not for revenge, but for justice and for truth. My disenchanted generation speaks of democracy, but we must ask if this democracy will be able to erase the traces, the scars of a maddening past where certain nations, among them Argentina, the most civilized and well-educated country in